


Someone to Hold on to Me, or, Dangerous Pagan Cuddling

by medrengirl



Series: Inspired by the AO3 Tag Generator [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cryptic Deaton, Cuddling, Dangerous Pagan Cuddling, Established Relationship, Insightful Derek, M/M, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Though Not Really So Dangerous, implied sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 18:18:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4231944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/medrengirl/pseuds/medrengirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“When you believe in the mountain ash, you don’t just believe that it will work in the abstract sense. You believe that werewolves can be contained, that it will protect you, that you’re safe from everything supernatural that is in the circle when it’s up, right?”</p><p>“Yeah.” </p><p>“I know you, Stiles. Do you really believe in peace and calm? That they are realistic, a true possibility?”<br/>—————————————————<br/>Stiles is having problems working the base sigil for the wards he wants to put up around Beacon Hills before he goes back to college. Belief is harder than it looks, sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone to Hold on to Me, or, Dangerous Pagan Cuddling

**Author's Note:**

> The AO3 Tag Generator prompt for this was "Dangerous Pagan Cuddling." This is probably not as dangerous or pagan as it should have been. But there’s plenty of cuddling!
> 
> Again, this is all cursor_mundi's fault.

“Stiles, I don’t understand why you are having such a hard time with this sigil,” Deaton sighed. “It’s not difficult.”

“Clearly it is, since _I can’t do it_.” Stiles hoisted himself off the floor, where he’d been sitting in a mountain ash circle, a scrawled symbol on a small chalkboard on the ground in front of him, and candle wax all over him.

“The sigil for peace and calm is one of the most basic of magical components. It’s integral to the wards you want to put up for the pack. And you really shouldn’t be blowing up the candle every time.”

Stiles ran his fingers through his hair. “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong. I can make a mountain ash circle twice the size it should be, I can make candles blow up at the slightest whim, and I can freaking move things with my mind!” Stiles glared at the table Deaton was leaning against and it shook, and Deaton straightened up quickly. “But I can’t make that stupid sigil _glow_.” This time he physically kicked the table.

“Look, why don’t you go home. You can work on this tomorrow.” Deaton moved to clean up the mountain ash and remains of the other candles on the table.

“Right, because I have months and months until I have to go back to school,” Stiles said sarcastically. “These wards need to be up before I leave to go back to Stanford, and it’s going to take me a while to get these all up! I cannot be coming back here every other week to help Scott and Derek deal with the next magical crisis because the Nemeton is still drawing things to Beacon Hills. My grades won’t take it, and I want to be able to spend what time I do have at home _not_ hunting the latest nasty. And while _you_ may not be willing to do that kind of work on behalf of the pack, _I_ am!” He was practically shouting by the time he was done.

Deaton turned to face Stiles, hands on his hips. “Go home,” he said flatly. “You’re angry and you’re not going to be able to do anything except explode things in this temper.”

“What, is anger not an acceptable incentive? Anger, fear, aggression, the dark side they are?” Stiles sneered.

Deaton raised an eyebrow. “What, you would trust Palpatine over Yoda? ‘I can feel your anger. It gives you focus, it makes you stronger!’”

Stiles deflated. “Well, at least you’ve seen Star Wars,” he muttered. “Even if you quote the prequels.”

“Go home, Stiles. See your boyfriend. Eat some curly fries.” Deaton turned and walked out of the room to leave Stiles to gather his things in silence. Deaton clearly knew him well. Curly fries and his boyfriend—the fact that Derek was his boyfriend was still so new it gave him a little thrill—would probably be the only things with a half way decent chance of improving his mood right now.

On his way out the door, Stiles texted Derek. _Training with Deaton a bust. In desperate need of curly fries. Dinner at my place?_

It was only a few moments before Derek replied. _I’ll be off in 10. Burger 2 is on my way, I’ll pick up your usual. Enough for your dad?_

 _Not on your life, buster. Besides, isn’t he working till late?_ Stiles had almost forgotten his father wouldn’t be home, and that alone made him perk up. Dad gone, Derek there…

_Your dad says he’ll eat the salad you made him bring, but only if you don’t complain if he has ice cream when he comes home. Be there soon._

Instead of responding, Stiles texted his dad directly. _Deal_.

Stiles started his Jeep and headed home. Derek and Stiles had agreed to start things off slow. Their relationship had begun with a spell, purple glowing lights, and Stiles clothed only in a towel, but both of them were cognizant of the fact that if they went as fast as they could… one, or, well, more likely both of them would screw it up.

But that was almost a month ago. They’d spent as much time as possible together—any day or evening that Derek had off. He was only working part-time as a deputy for Stiles’ dad. Sometimes they hung with the pack, sometimes with Stiles’ dad, but as often as not alone. They had _delicious_ make out sessions, but they also spent a lot of their time talking—something Stiles was a bit surprised by, because Derek had never struck him as the talkative type. Except apparently when they were alone.

Now it was just a few weeks until he went back to school at Stanford. It was close enough that he could get home in three or four hours (if the Bay traffic wasn’t significantly worse than average), but his school load was heavy enough that he couldn’t afford to do that every weekend.

And Stiles was starting to get antsy. He was a healthy teenage boy (though not for much longer, less than a year) with the requisite sex drive. His boyfriend was a sweet-and-sour-wolf with a physique to die for. He didn’t want to push Derek to anything he wasn’t ready for, but Stiles was _ready_.

Even if he couldn’t make that sigil work, maybe they could finally move things to the next level.

 

***

 

They didn’t move things to the next level as quickly as Stiles expected. The attempts at magic had taken more out of Stiles than he had realized. He had kissed Derek as a thank you for the food, gulped down the burger and curly fries … and then promptly collapsed on the couch.

He woke up an hour later with his head in Derek’s lap and the rest of his body sprawled across the length of the couch, with his legs over the arm. Derek was reading a book he had clearly grabbed from Stiles’ bookcase upstairs, because _Good Omens_ had definitely been on the shelf this morning.

“Sorry,” Stiles yawned, stretching. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep on you like that. Literally or otherwise.”

Derek smiled down at him. “It’s fine, I don’t mind.” He stroked his hand over Stiles’ hair, which was soft and, in Stiles’ estimation, getting a bit long. “Want to tell me what happened with Deaton today?”

“Ugh.” Stiles scrunched his nose. “I was trying to work on the wards, but I have to get the sigil down for peace and calm, and I was failing miserably. Couldn’t get it to glow.”

“Does every spell you do glow?” Derek asked with a grin.

“No!” Stiles turned his head to bury his face in Derek’s stomach and blew a raspberry into Derek’s shirt.

“Stop that!” Derek laughed.

“You’re happy today,” Stiles observed as he turned to look back up at Derek. “Good day?”

“Well, I spent a couple hours directing traffic at a stop light that blew out.”

Stiles recoiled. “That sounds hellish.”

“It was actually fairly peaceful. Almost everyone did exactly what I told them the first time, and the ones who didn’t actually responded to my glare and implicit threats. It was better than dealing with you back when I was alpha,” Derek teased.

“Touché,” Stiles said.

“So what went wrong with the sigil?” Derek prodded Stiles, not letting him get off track.

Stiles groaned. “I don’t know! I can do all sorts of other things, most of the other sigils for protecting the pack work just fine, but this is one of the base sigils that has to work for the others to integrate.”

“Tell me about how the magic works.” Derek stroked Stiles’ hair again. It felt comforting, and Stiles relaxed into it. He rarely felt as good as when Derek touched him, even in these small, almost completely non-sexual ways.

“Well,” Stiles said, “the sigil that is being a pain in my keister is supposed to help preserve the peace and calm in Beacon Hills, but dissolve if the town experiences an outside attack. I light a candle that’s made with basil, thyme, and bay leaves, and then I draw the sigil while focusing on peace, calm, and protection. If it works, the sigil glows. If it doesn’t, well, the candle explodes.” Stiles pointed at a few red marks on his arms that had come from hot wax splattering him. “The sigil is the one passive element of the combination of protections I'm planning, so it’s the one piece that everything else depends on. The rest are alarms and defenses, and if the sigil for peace and calm stops working, it will set off the others. Eventually, I’ll mark all the sigils on a bunch of trees and buildings around the edges of town and the preserve.”

“That’s what they’ll do, but how does it work to make them?”

Stiles cuddled into Derek a little more. “That’s what makes it so frustrating. It’s supposed to be like mountain ash—I’m just supposed to believe hard enough to make it work. But I _feel_ like I believe that this will work the same amount as I do when I work with mountain ash, but for some reason it’s not enough. I keep accidentally blowing up candles instead, and that’s almost the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to do.”

“Are you sure you’re believing the right thing?”

Stiles adjusted himself so he could meet Derek’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

“When you believe in the mountain ash, you don’t just believe that it will work in the abstract sense. You believe that werewolves can be contained, that it will protect you, that you’re safe from everything supernatural that is in the circle when it’s up, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I know you, Stiles. Do you really believe in peace and calm? That they are realistic, a true possibility?”

Stiles was silent for a moment. Derek was probably right. Stiles was the one always planning for the next shoe to drop (there were so many shoes that could drop). Derek could be nearly as pessimistic as Stiles, but he usually waited for the shoe to actually drop before he started dreading it. Scott? Scott would always have an optimistic view of the future. The other members of the pack were somewhere in between.

But the whole reason Stiles was creating the wards was because he believed that trouble was coming, absolutely, for sure, and that it was even always already here. That Beacon Hills was by definition neither peaceful nor calm. He could joke about not wanting to come back every weekend to deal with it, but it was more that he was worried that if he didn’t set up the wards, trouble would explode and destroy everything before he could even get back.

That had been Stiles’ _modus operandi_ ever since his mother died. Stiles hounded his dad about eating healthy because he _believed_ that if he didn’t, his dad’s health would go down the toilet. Because he _believed_ he could hold Derek up in water for hours at a time while he was paralyzed, he could do it. He could make the other sigils work because he _believed_ in the active elements, that they would work to protect everyone.

But how could he make himself believe in peace and calm?

Stiles said as much to Derek.

“You’ll figure it out.” Derek leaned down and gave Stiles a kiss, which Stiles surged up to meet. He wrapped his hand around Derek’s nape to give him just that extra bit of leverage to hold himself up—his abs were good, but they weren’t _that_ good. He ran his tongue over Derek’s lips, and sighed when Derek’s tongue met his.

When they broke apart, Stiles was almost breathless. He scooted himself up until he was sitting in Derek’s lap. “You know, when I was driving home, I was thinking that I didn’t have as much time left this summer as I wanted.”

“Oh?” Derek cocked an eyebrow.

“I was thinking maybe we’ve moved slow enough and could kick things up a gear now?”

Derek’s mouth widened in a smile. “What did you have in mind?”

Stiles kissed Derek’s neck, up to the side of Derek’s jaw, pulling a soft noise from Derek’s throat. Stiles murmured in his ear, “Upstairs? My bed?”

Next thing Stiles knew, Derek was standing up with Stiles in his arms in a bridal carry—and then they were heading up the stairs.

 

***

 

After Stiles pulled his boxer briefs back on and tossed the shirt that he’d used to clean up the rather wonderful mess they’d made between them—well, the mess wasn’t wonderful, but the kissing and frottage and hand jobs leading up to it certainly had been—Derek pulled Stiles down onto his chest and settled Stiles between his legs.

“I’m glad you’re a cuddler,” Stiles muttered into Derek’s shoulder. “I always feel better when you’re touching me.”

“Me too.”

“Is it a wolf thing, or just a Derek thing?” Stiles asked.

“Me wanting to cuddle, or that I feel better when I touch you? Because both things are true of you, and you aren’t a wolf or a Derek,” Derek teased.

Stiles sighed contentedly. “I want things to always be like this.”

“Post-coital, you mean?” Derek kissed Stiles’ hair and stroked his flank.

“Well, not always post-coital, I liked the coitus itself too much to give it up.”

“We haven’t even gotten to the truly coital stuff yet.” Derek’s hand trailed down and stroked Stiles’ ass through the cotton, making Stiles shiver just a bit.

“I can’t wait. Well, I have to, because I need a bit more refractory time, but I don’t want to.”

Derek laughed. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

Stiles paused, and then raised himself up above Derek so he could look him full in the face. “What?” Derek asked, a puzzled look on his face.

“Yeah,” Stiles breathed. “I think we do.” He sat up fully. “I think I can believe now.”

“Now? You need _sex_ to believe in peace and calm?”

“No! Well, not exactly. It’s not the sex, it’s the post-sex _cuddling_.” Stiles scrambled to his feet. “Up, up! I need your help for this!”

“My help?”

“Look, remember what I said about sparks needing partners for various spells? Some of that is for the power of it, which, when you get to the big spells, sometimes you need the extra juice. But some of it is because we need someone to balance us, anchor—” Stiles stopped, then plowed ahead. “You’re my anchor. I don’t just need to hold on to someone—I do that all the time already. I hold on to _everyone_. But that’s not peace and calm. That’s what I do because I’m frantic, when I’m afraid. What I need is something, someone that _holds on to me_. That won’t let me go. That’s what I needed to believe. That someone would hold on to me.”

Derek’s face cracked into a soft smile as he let Stiles tug him to his feet. “You want me to cuddle you while you make the sigil.”

“Yup!” Stiles said. “Can’t hurt to try, right?”

“I don’t know, it sounds dangerous to me,” Derek mocked. “Didn’t you say you were accidentally blowing up candles?”

“I think we can handle a little hot wax.”

“Kinky,” Derek deadpanned.

Stiles tried to waggle his eyebrows lasciviously, though he was sure he failed. “Maybe next time.”

Stiles pulled a candle (one of several) and the chalkboard from his bag and set them on the floor. He looked at the mountain ash Deaton would have had him use to make a protective circle. Not this time. Not with Derek. That would be just exchanging one kind of danger for another.

“Okay, come here, sit behind me and cuddle the shit out of me,” he said as he settled himself on the floor.

“Do you have to recite a bad poem like you did that one time?” Derek asked as he pressed himself up against Stiles’ back, wrapping his arms around Stiles’ stomach.

Stiles laughed. “No, no poems this time. Just lots of focus, lighting the candle with my mind, and then drawing the sigil.”

Derek kissed Stiles’ shoulder. “Okay. Do you need me do anything besides hold you?”

“Just breathe with me?” Stiles could feel Derek nod behind him, and then start to get his breathing in sync with Stiles.

Stiles started by focusing on the way Derek’s hands were strong and calm, crossed against Stiles’ belly. Then the way his arms wrapped around Stiles, making him feel protected and safe. The way the slow and gentle feel of Derek’s breathing behind him helped him know there was no danger, that they were at peace. He held it all in his mind, and opened his eyes and focused on the candle, imagining it coming to life in a steady, warm flame—and it did.

So far, so good.

He took the chalk in his hand, and began to draw the sigil, pushing all those feelings from lighting the candle into every stroke of his hand across the chalkboard. He imagined those feelings spreading out from him to the rest of the house. That he could feel Derek’s steady touch even if he was in the kitchen, feel their bodies cuddled together even if he was doing laundry.

As he finished marking the last line of the sigil, it came to life on the board, flaring in a warm yellow light before disappearing entirely.

“Did it work?” Derek asked. “The candle didn’t explode, and the sigil glowed, but I can’t see it anymore.”

“Yeah, it was supposed to do that. No good having sigils just lying around where people can see them and destroy them. If it stops working it will become visible again.” Stiles leaned back against Derek. “I almost can’t believe it really worked. It feels really anti-climactic, after all those exploding candles.”

“The chalkboard will feel peace and calm for all time.” Derek nuzzled Stiles’ neck.

“It’ll probably work for the base of the house’s protection system, actually, once I get the whole thing up and running.”

“Do you need to do that now, or can we go back to post-coital cuddling on the bed until your dad gets home?”

“If he finds us in bed it might dissolve the peace and calm,” Stiles warned.

“Really?” Derek pulled back to look at Stiles.

“No, not really.” Stiles laughed. “But it would probably result in a lot of teasing about the need for safe cuddling.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> This series will likely have a third part. Next story up is going to be based on the prompt “hardcore tree threesome” and will (maybe) up the rating on the series. Tentative title is "Hardwood is Hardcore."


End file.
